


Spider Crawling Up Your Spine

by superqueerdanvers



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Eating bugs, Gen, Horror, Original Character Death(s), Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Spiders, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), University, body control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24284362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superqueerdanvers/pseuds/superqueerdanvers
Summary: Statement of Alex Parker, regarding her encounter with a strange woman and the events that followed. Original statement given 3 April 2014. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins.“There’s this nursery rhyme… game… thing that I learned as a kid. It goes: 'Dot, dot, line, line. Spider crawling up your spine. Gentle squeeze, cool breeze. Now you’ve got the shiveries!'"
Comments: 8
Kudos: 7





	Spider Crawling Up Your Spine

Statement of Alex Parker, regarding her encounter with a strange woman and the events that followed. Original statement given 3 April 2014. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins.

* * *

There’s this nursery rhyme… game… thing that I learned as a kid. It goes: “Dot, dot, line, line. Spider crawling up your spine. Gentle squeeze, cool breeze. Now you’ve got the shiveries!” You play it standing behind another person. On “Dot, dot,” you tap the other person’s back twice. “Line, line,” you trace two lines down their back. On “Spider crawling up your spine,” you crawl your hand up their back like a spider. “Gentle squeeze,” you squeeze their arms. “Cool breeze,” you blow on the back of their neck. On “Now you’ve got the shiveries!” you rub their arms. It probably sounds really weird and creepy if you haven’t heard it before, and it definitely freaks me out now. But it didn’t bother me when I was little. It was just a fun game.

The kids I babysit seemed to like it too when I taught it to them. There’s two of them, a professor’s kids. A four-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl. I’d rather not give their names, if that’s all right with you. My statement’s not really about them, and I want to protect their privacy.

Anyway, I remembered the game and taught it to the kids about a month or so ago, and they loved it. We were at the park a few days later, and the girl asked me to play the spider game with her. I did, and she squealed and giggled and ran back to the sandbox to play with her brother. No big deal. Then someone asked, “Can I do it on you?”

I turned around, and there was a black woman with bleached blonde hair sitting on the bench next to me. There was a web of white lines on her temple – I don’t know if they were scars, or a tattoo, or what. Hell, maybe it was some sort of lace hair accessory. I don’t know. “Can I do it on you?” she asked again.

I said no, of course. I didn’t know the woman, and I don’t like strangers touching me. And I definitely don’t like strangers playing spider-themed children’s games with me. But she didn’t take no for an answer. “Let me do it on you.” This time, she wasn’t asking.

I told her to fuck off, and I stood up. I opened my mouth to call the kids over and tell them we were leaving, but before I could say anything, she said, “Turn around.”

I didn’t want to. I swear I didn’t want to. I wanted to take the kids and get as far away from this woman as possible. But I closed my mouth and turned around. I didn’t move – couldn’t move -- as the woman stepped close behind me and leaned forward to whisper into my ear.

“Dot, dot.” She tapped my back.

“Line, line.” She traced her fingers down my back.

“Spider crawling up your spine.” I could hear the smile in her voice as she ran her hand up my back, and I could have sworn it felt like she had more than five fingers.

“Gentle squeeze.” The squeeze may have been gentle, but it did nothing to ease my nerves.

“Cool breeze.” Her breath was icy cold on my neck, and I got goose bumps.

“Now you’ve got the shiveries!” Well, that was certainly true.

Still gripping my upper arms, the woman laughed in my ear. And then she was gone. I don’t mean she let go and walked away, I mean she disappeared. I realized I could move again, and I looked around, and she was nowhere to be seen. I called the kids over, and we left.

That night, as I falling asleep, I felt someone in the bed with me. I’m a side sleeper, and I don’t have a roommate, but there was someone lying in bed behind me, practically spooning me. I heard the voice of the woman from the park, whispering in my ear again. “Dot, dot, line, line. Spider crawling up your spine. Gentle squeeze, cool breeze. Now you’ve got the shiveries!”

I screamed and sat up. I turned on the light, my skin crawling and the woman’s laugh echoing in my ears, but there was no one there. I told myself it was just my imagination, though I was sure I’d heard her voice, felt her hands and breath. I was just still a little freaked out, that was all. I watched TV for a little while, then put on some calming music and went to sleep.

The next day, I was getting lunch at the dining hall when it happened again. I heard the woman’s voice, and I felt her fingers on my back. I froze, and someone bumped into me and spilled spaghetti on my white shirt, but I couldn’t move until the woman finished the game. I was sure she was there, but my friends swore there had been no one behind me.

It continued like that for about a week. Every so often – about once or twice a day – the woman would play the spider game with me. I would be frozen in place as she whispered in my ear, ran her fingers up and down my back, squeezed my arms, and breathed on my neck. The she would laugh, and I could move again. There was never any evidence that she’d been there.

Then one day, I was sitting in my mechanical engineering class taking notes when the woman played the spider game with me, but she didn’t let me go after “Now you’ve got the shiveries.” Instead, my hand, frozen mid-word, moved to the margin of my notebook and drew a detailed black widow spider sitting on a web. I want to be clear – I did not just doodle a spider and spider web. I do sometimes doodle on my notes, but it’s usually things like stars and spirals and stick figures. Never anything as intricate as that drawing, and never spiders. I finished the drawing, she laughed, and I could move on my own again.

After that, each time the woman played the spider game, she made me do something before she let me go. At first, it was relatively small things. Request _Charlotte’s Web_ from the library. Walk around my room singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” But then it escalated. She made me steal a rubber tarantula and put it on my severely arachnophobic RA’s pillow. She held me at my desk for hours in the middle of the night as she made me read all 79 pages of an article about spider mating habits.

One night, I was using the bathroom before bed when I saw a cockroach on the floor. I was about to go back to my room for Raid when the woman played the spider game with me. To my horror, I bent down, picked up the cockroach, and put it in my mouth. Don’t get me wrong, I know there are lots of cultures that eat bugs, and it’s perfectly normal for them, and that’s fine. But this was a live cockroach from the floor of a university dorm’s communal bathroom. The woman made me close my mouth and chew. I desperately wanted to gag, to spit it out, but I couldn’t. Painfully slowly, I crushed the squirming cockroach between my teeth. I swallowed it, then swept my tongue around my mouth for any stray bits between my teeth, then swallowed those too. Like the cockroach was a delicious chocolate bar. Finally, she let me go. I gagged and spat, rinsed my mouth out as well as I could, brushed my teeth again and again, begged my RA for mouthwash. Nothing got the taste out of my mouth, and I could hear the woman laughing as I tried.

The next night, I woke up around two AM to the woman playing the spider game. I had grown used to her interrupting my sleep at this point – at least as much as you can get used to an invisible woman randomly taking control of your body -- so at first I wasn’t any more concerned than usual. Without stopping to put on shoes or a jacket or anything more than the thin t-shirt and shorts I slept in, I walked out of my room, down the hall, and out of my dorm. This surprised me, as she had never made me leave my dorm before. I walked across campus barefoot. I was cold, I stepped on a couple sharp rocks, and it was so dark I’m pretty sure I would have tripped on something if I’d been in control of my body. But of course, I wasn’t, and I didn’t break my stride.

I arrived at the biology building. I’d never been inside, but a bio major friend had pointed it out to me at some point. My hand reached for the door handle, and although I was sure academic buildings were supposed to be locked at night, the door opened easily. I walked purposefully through the building, though it was dark and I had no idea where I was going.

I opened another door and stepped into what must have been a lab of some sort, judging from what I could see by the moonlight coming in through the window. There were tables and equipment I didn’t recognize in the middle of the room, but the walls were lined with glass tanks. Without hesitating, I went to the nearest tank and took the lid off. Immediately, something small scuttled up the sides of the tank, and I had just enough time to recognize it as a spider and remember that I’d heard something about a couple bio professors studying spiders before I was opening the next tank. I opened tank after tank, freeing all the spiders in the lab. Some of them crawled on me, but I couldn’t scream or brush them off. I could only open more tanks, free more spiders. Once I had opened all the tanks, I went into another room, also full of tanks of spiders, opened the tanks, and did the same thing. Then I moved on to the next room. And then the next room.

I think the fourth room must have been the last spider lab, because after all the spiders in that room were free, I left the biology building. I stood under a streetlight and looked down at myself. I had known I was covered in spiders – I could feel them crawling on me – but now the woman wanted me to _see_ them. And I did. They ran up and down my arms and legs, scurrying into and out of my pajamas. One was weaving a web between my fingers. Another was laying eggs on my thigh. I could feel more in my hair. A spider crawled across my face and paused next to my eye, and I couldn’t blink or move my head or do anything to get it away.

Finally, I heard the woman laugh, and I sobbed with relief when she let me go. I swatted at the spiders, brushing them off as best I could, but there were too many. I ran back to my dorm, tore off my pajamas, and got in the shower. I rinsed spider after spider down the drain, and scrubbed webs and egg sacs from my skin. Once all traces of the spiders were gone, I stood under the water and sobbed.

That was a week ago. I haven’t heard the woman and she hasn’t made me do anything since, but I’ve been finding an awful lot of spiders in my room lately.

* * *

Statement ends.

Well, that was… unsettling. The woman Ms. Parker describes matches the description of Annabelle Cane, and of course the spiders and the theme of being controlled are characteristic of the Web.

Alex Parker was a senior engineering student at the University of Manchester in 2014. There were in fact three professors studying spiders there at the time, and one was also teaching an invertebrate zoology class that included spiders, which accounts for the four labs full of spiders. One professor was studying spider silk, one was studying venom, and one was studying their mating. Someone did set all the lab spiders loose on the night of March 27, 2014, which matches Ms. Parker’s story.

Martin managed to track down a couple of Ms. Parker’s friends, who said that while Ms. Parker was a bright student who did well in her classes, she seemed increasingly anxious and agitated starting around early March, when she would have met Annabelle. She was found dead on April 5, two days after giving this statement. The cause of death was ruled to be a spider bite.


End file.
